SMS for E-Communications

A Summary of HSL's Top Winter Communication Tips

2011-10-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

We hope you’ve enjoyed our blog series this week, and that we’ve helped you understand both what needs to be done to prepare for adverse weather this winter and how to go about doing it. Here is a summary of the key points:

• Plan ahead
• Communicate quickly and effectively
• Be flexible
• Remember health & safety
• Be aware of the legal situation
• Think about remote working
• Keep in touch
• Review, revise and implement

And

• Contact HSL for a low-cost effective mobile messaging solution

We’ve been growing HSL for 12 years, working with high profile customers such as BAA, DHL, Sony Ericsson, the Police and government organisations, but we also enjoy working with smaller companies too.

We have a global coverage of more than 630 mobile networks, within more than 200 countries. It’s built on a robust technical infrastructure that allows us to provide a guarantee of at least 99.9% network availability to our customers.

So we know that we do a great job providing low-cost, effective mobile messaging solutions and we’d like to work with you. Please get in touch soon to ensure your business is prepared for the worst this winter will bring.

Thank you for reading our blogs – we’d like to leave you with a smile on your face, so please enjoy this funny video clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3hbd0nnr3E

visit us at:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/hay-systems-ltd

follow us on Twitter @HSLSMS
or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@haysystems.com

How to incorporate SMS text messaging as part of your crisis communications

2011-10-27T01:43:00.000-07:00

So far this week we’ve shared our best advice with you; it’s best practice gathered from working with our clients across a broad spectrum of sectors – and countries – and we know it works.

Now we want to explain how HSL can help you and your business.

If bad weather conditions or public transport make it difficult or dangerous for employees to get to work, you need to communicate quickly with them to ensure that they do not travel to work unnecessarily and work from home when possible. The most immediate and effective way to do that is sending a text message and that’s where we come in.

SMS messaging is not only a simple solution – we set up the whole process for you – it’s an incredibly cost-effective one.

And it’s important to remember as well that text messaging is much more mainstream than other forms of communication like social media or even email and it’s quicker and easier to manage than a hasty round robin telephone call.

There’s a perceived immediacy with a text message compared to other forms of communication; you’ve seen it, people regularly stop what they’re doing to read a text, and while ownership of smart phones is growing exponentially, only 28% of adults in the UK are using their phone to access emails.

We send millions of messages a month on behalf of customers, not just in the UK but around the world – 85% of our customers are in Europe, 9% in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and 6% in the USA and Canada.

Our customers use messaging in a variety of ways, from routine communications updates to messaging in emergency situations, such as issuing early warning alerts for Tsunamis and search and rescue alerts.

We’d like to share a case study with you to show how it works; Dartmoor Search & Rescue Team has been working with HSL for five years. They have used SMS messaging to replace their paging call out system. Given the nature of the organisation and the service it provides, it was vital that they ensured a reliable service.

In an emergency situation, the rescue group is called out by the Police when there is reason to believe that one or more people may be missing or injured on Dartmoor. An SMS message is then sent to a broadcast number, which automates a call-out message to be sent to team members, who can then send a confirmation of attendance text to the broadcaster. The SMS technology also provides Dartmoor Search and Rescue Group with a means of communicating with their members on a regular basis.

To this day this emergency team continues to utilise HSL's AlertBroadcast solution, as over the years HSL's solution has remained a reliable and effective messaging system for their teams.

Paul Hudson, Controller for Dartmoor Search & Rescue Group says, "The system has been proven to be extremely reliable on callouts since we began its use 5 years ago!"

Based on our emergency experience, we think there is big opportunity to use text messaging as a rapid, efficient and low cost way to communicate to help avoid some of the travel chaos during severe weather and we’d like to help you.

visit us at:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/hay-systems-ltd

follow us on Twitter @HSLSMS
or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@haysystems.com

Snow chaos and your legal rights, and remote working

2011-10-26T04:35:00.000-07:00

Experts estimate that around 2000 businesses were at risk of failure due to the bad weather last winter. In a tough economic climate it doesn’t take much to push a business to the edge, and the treacherous snow and ice conditions only served to push even closer to disaster.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

With the Met Office forecasting a similarly difficult winter, it’s important to start planning now; companies that plan for adverse weather conditions, communicate well – and in a timely fashion - with their employees, and put plans in place to allow staff to work from home can minimise the potential impact on their business.

Did you know, it’s a fact that home workers are often more efficient than office-based workers? And in a crisis situation an employee working from home is certainly more efficient than an employee stuck in a snowbound traffic jam for most of the morning, unable to fulfil their customer commitments, who then spends the rest of the day discussing their nightmare journey and planning an early finish to get home before the weather deteriorates even further.

Employers have a legal duty of care to ensure their employees are not placed at unnecessary risk while working, and when police and weather forecasters warn people not to travel, employers should be making sure their employees know they have permission to stay at home, and are properly equipped to do their job from there.

You should be aware of how the law affects you and your employees in a situation where the weather conditions are severe and it’s deemed dangerous to travel by experts. Read up on guidance on employment policies to make sure you know what’s reasonable to expect of your staff and what’s not. And make sure your own policies reflect both the law, and your own values about care of your employees. A good policy should cover issues including entitlement to time off, entitlement to paid or unpaid leave, working from home and flexible working hours to avoid dangerous or rush hour traffic and travel.

And bearing in mind the fact about home workers and efficiency, you should also be thinking about technology outside the office, equipment, communications and remote connectivity that will make it possible for employees to work from home. It’s a good idea to ensure staff have laptops and internet connections at home (where necessary) and that they have the passwords – and of course, the knowledge – to safely and securely access servers at work.

Finally, don’t forget to keep in touch. Just because you’ve advised employees to stay at home doesn’t mean your job’s done. Communicating with staff throughout the course of the bad weather not only shows you care, but ensures everyone feels involved and part of the team. SMS text messages allow you to personalise messages to individual staff or send an immediate message to all staff at the same time. You can keep them updated on the weather situation or communicate about individual work requirements.

Remember, text messaging has the highest open and read rates over email and other forms of communication. A recent study found that text messaging opening rates were above 92% - and of these messages, 65% were read within five minutes and 85% within an hour.

And it’s cheap too – for just a few pence each, it’s possible to send bulk texts to your employees and keep your business alive and thriving whatever the weather.

Tomorrow – how to incorporate SMS text messaging as part of your crisis communications

visit us at:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/hay-systems-ltd

follow us on Twitter @HSLSMS
or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@haysystems.com

Planning, flexibility and health and safety

2011-10-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

We know from working closely with our clients just how important it is to be able to react quickly to changing circumstances, and to be able to communicate what needs to happen both reliably and cost effectively.

So we have put together our top tips for preparing to deal with adverse weather conditions, starting with planning ahead.

It sounds simple, but make sure you have an adverse weather policy that describes clearly and in detail the various steps the company and employees should take in severe weather conditions.

If you don’t have such a policy, think back to how you coped last winter, how effective were you, what was the impact on your business and your employees, and what could you have done better. These are the building blocks for your new policy.

You need to have up to date contact details for employees, customers, suppliers and other important business contacts, and this information needs to be accessible in a crisis, from wherever you might be at the time. It’s a good idea to save these in multiple locations and/or in the cloud. And make sure you have multiple ways of contacting all these people; you need home and mobile phone numbers as well as email addresses. You’ll also need this for SMS texting.

Think about who should be responsible for communicating in a severe weather crisis, and clearly define that role, making sure those involved understand their responsibilities and are happy to fulfil them. And it’s a good idea to share the roles and responsibilities between a group of people to ensure absence cover for sickness or holidays.

Ideally, practice your plan before you have to implement it in a real situation, you can learn from any mistakes or gaps in the plan and refine to make sure it’s really effective.

And once you’ve had a chance to test your plan in a live situation, review again, amending to incorporate any changes that might be necessary – you never know when you might need to use it again.

If the forecast for this winter is accurate, you could be implementing the plan sooner rather than later.

visit us at:

http://www.linkedin.com/company/hay-systems-ltd

or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@haysystems.com

Tomorrow – snow chaos and your legal rights, and remote working.

Preparing Your Business for Winter

2011-10-24T02:31:00.001-07:00

Can you remember what you were doing at the height of the snow disruption last winter?

Were you one of the unfortunate people stranded in cars or buses on the motorway, or at an airport, with little or no communication about when you’d finally be able to continue on your way?

Were you an employer worried about your staff getting to work, hastily trying to contact them before they left home to warn them about the conditions?

Communication in business can be difficult at the best of times, but in a crisis situation such as we experienced last winter, the challenges are even more significant.

There’s confusion around whether or not to try to get to work, worries over employees putting themselves at risk to get to work for fear of reprisal, and concerns over others using the adverse weather conditions as an excuse for a duvet day.

Our team works with a wide range of organisations in a variety of sectors around the world, so we know that regardless of location, industry or business size, it’s vital to be able to communicate readily, reliably and cost-effectively with employees and customers.

And there’s a simple solution to what can be a business-threatening issue: SMS texting.
91% of the UK population owns a mobile phone and most of them carry their mobile phones at all times, reading the messages they receive as soon as possible. It only takes a few seconds to send a bulk text message to employees, and the messages can be automated, personalised and sent through a mobile phone or by email for utmost ease and flexibility. It’s also very easy to track responses and replies, ensuring an audit trail, should that prove necessary.
So you can see that SMS texting is the perfect channel for urgent messages. When severe weather conditions threaten to disrupt your business, you can quickly and effectively reduce the impact on your company by sending a text to employees advising them to work from home rather than attempt a dangerous journey.

Not only do you ensure business continuity, but more importantly you protect your employees’ safety at the same time.

Scotland has experienced two severe winters in a row, last year’s was the worst in several decades, and this year doesn’t look like being any milder.

So follow our blogs for the rest of the week and pick up our top tips for preparing your business, your employees and your customers for a tough winter.

We’ll tell you about planning, health and safety, technology for home working and cover the legalities of entitlement to time off if the weather is too dangerous for travel.

visit us at:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/hay-systems-ltd

follow us on Twitter @HSLSMS
or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@haysystems.com
Tomorrow – planning, flexibility and health and safety.

Everyone’s dreaming of a white Christmas but the reality is never quite as magical as dreams would have us believe.

2011-10-21T04:50:00.000-07:00

Last year’s white Christmas became a white November, December, January and February, with blizzards, slush, treacherous driving conditions, sub-zero temperatures for days, with icy roads and pavements and shortages of grit across the country.

People stayed home, some trapped by the snow, the lucky ones just advised by police not to venture out. Crucially, businesses across the UK suffered as many employees were unable to get to work; those that made it struggled to meet customer demand with a skeleton staff, those stuck at home were unable to work because companies simply didn’t have an adverse weather plan in place.

The impact on business was significant – the extreme conditions and bad weather cost the UK economy an estimated £1.2bn per day last winter. More than a third of the UK’s small businesses had to close, 74% of UK workers were affected, and a staggering 6.4 million people were unable to get to work in the snow.

Unfortunately, the forecast for this year is pretty much the same. And we can expect it sooner rather than later.

The Met Office is predicting the weather to become increasingly unsettled from Sunday 23 October and indeed some areas of Scotland have already seen some snow.

But businesses and employees don’t have to endure a repeat of last year, it is possible to minimise the impact and plan for the challenges that extreme weather brings.

Next week is Get Ready for Winter Week, and we’ll be bringing you a series of blogs with advice on how best to prepare your business so that you can continue working, keeping your employees both well informed and safe.

M2M and SMS

2011-09-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

A periodic "ping" from a GSM module attached to truck, car or shipping container is commonly used to provide location information back to a control centre. The same technology is equally applied to tracking individuals whether they be lone workers or those working sensitive areas where the use of panic alarms is necessary in case of emergency. Determining the location of something through mobile (or wide area) networks is one of many uses of M2M (machine-to-machine).

The use of SMS in these situations is often to compliment GPRS data but you might ask why use SMS at all when GPRS should suffice? The answer is simply that GPRS is not always available, particularly on 3G networks but also on 2G networks, in the location in which the GSM module is located. It's a fact that it is more likely that SMS will continue to be available where GPRS is not possible due to, for example, distance from a base station, interference or being located within a building.

M2M is a growing area with its roots in mobile telemetry and is a subset of the "internet of things" in which millions (more likely, billions) of mostly simple machines will communicate with each other and centralised systems. GPRS will play an increasing role in M2M as the number of M2M devices significantly increases. SMS will also play an increasing role in M2M, again as the number of devices increases, but also as it will continue to be a service that is available where GPRS data is not.

Text Messaging for Schools and Companies to Ease Winter Misery

2010-12-13T23:52:00.000-08:00

As the extreme winter weather continues to hit most of the country, companies and schools are faced with the huge task of contacting customers, staff and parents. Companies need to quickly advise their customers and staff of important information such as office closures and alternative working arrangements. Schools must advise parents as soon as possible that they should not bring their children to school or in the event of worsening weather conditions and building problems schools need to communicate with parents to collect their children early.

Making contact with customers, staff and parents when an organisation needs to do so quickly can be a resource intensive process and one which can take a considerable length of time if someone needs to phone around and speak to all contacts. Most people nowadays have their mobile phones with them and so are immediately contactable by a phone call, but more importantly can be contacted by SMS text message. SMS text messaging is an instant and extremely powerful tool for contacting a large number of people simultaneously.

SMS text messaging is used by a number of organisations throughout the UK and worldwide for communicating in emergencies or distributing information in less urgent situations. Schools and nurseries are a prime example of where the use of SMS text messaging can allow quick communication with a high number of parents and staff in a cost effective way. No company or school should be without such a powerful communications tool at any point in the year, not least during the winter months. With the extreme weather conditions we are experiencing again at this time of year SMS reduces the burden. SMS can improve communications and can assist when implementing contingency plans but at the same time SMS can save companies and schools a significant amount of money by being more efficient and effective in their communications.

HSL provides a number of services and solutions that can be used to enable communication with large groups of people efficiently and effectively. HSL's WebSMS solution provides a web browser interface that can be used from any computer to easily send messages to large groups of people simultaneously. Delivery to each recipient of the SMS is confirmed, meaning you can track the delivery of each message sent. The HSL AlertBroadcast solution allows a "controller" user to remotely send a message from their own mobile handset to a large number of mobile phones simply by sending a single SMS message, removing the need to be at a computer at all.

Messaging Volumes Continue to Grow

2010-10-05T03:22:00.000-07:00

The Telecommunications Market Data Update Q1 2010 from the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom, shows that mobile users are continuing to make greater use of mobile messaging. The total SMS and MMS messaging volumes for the four main UK operators reached nearly 27 billion in Q1 2010, compared with 21.4 billion in Q1 2009.

SMS and Community Policing

2010-08-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

The challenge of policing in a modern society such as the UK should be easier than in earlier years through the advantage that advances in technology bring to preventing crime and disorder. Technology alone has not been able to keep police forces ahead of crime, even with good programmes such as Community Safety Partnerships (CSP) that build a stronger relationship between the police and the community.

The level of policing required to tackle crime and disorder can vary from country to country. In Germany, two thirds of people surveyed said that they would intervene to stop antisocial behaviour (ASB). This contrasts with only one third of people in the UK who said in a similar survey that they would intervene to stop ASB.

Dealing with antisocial behaviour in the UK and the public's reluctance to try to stop it is in part due to a strong aversion to being in harms way, but also to a reluctance to get involved bordering on apathy. This reluctance is in part due to the perception of effort required to report a problem to the police. People may think that they'll be on the phone for a long time and possibly could be getting on with something else. They think that their details will be taken and there will be further - undesired - involvement on their part. This is all just slightly too much when all they what to do is let the police know that there's something that they need to take a look into.

Unless there is a police officer close at hand then you have to make a telephone call to report something that you've noticed. If it's a very serious matter then people would not normally hesitate too much to make the call. However, if it's a group of people vandalising the childrens' play park then there will (unfortunately) be greater reluctance to report the matter. The likelihood of the matter being reported can be increased by making it easier to report it to the police.

By using an SMS texting service where the police can be contacted for non-emergency (i.e. not life threatening) matters, the police can become more accessible to the community. The technology can also be coupled with location information to show where the individual was at the time they reported the matter, and this taken with the content of the message, can add context and clarity to the report. For example, if the person reporting the matter was not clear enough about the location of the incident then the accompanying location information that such a SMS texting service could provide would add accuracy.

SMS is a widely used technology that is discrete, quick and easy to use. As a means for increasing communication through a less formal conduit with the police it can be an effective technology if properly embraced. A common non-emergency phone number across the UK that can be used for voice and text and help increase the adoption of the SMS texting service for reporting incidents to police. It should be mandatory that mobile network operators provide their subscribers with access to the service and that use of this service for reporting incidents to the police not be included on bills and be free of charge to the subscriber.

Manage expectations and perception of business through improved communication

2010-04-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

The recent eruption of the volcano on Iceland has had a large impact on the aviation industry, but also transport by road, rail and sea as people try to find alternatives to flying while airlines were grounded. There have been reports of poor communication with passengers, for which both airlines and airports have been guilty. The confusion and anxiety caused by the grounding of flights could have been mitigated to some degree through better communication with passengers.

I read an interesting blog, admittedly from one of our partners, on the use of notification software to help improve communication during such incidents and improve customer service and the perception of the airlines. Their blog can be found at http://matthesderdack.blogspot.com/2010/04/volcano-ash-caused-information-chaos.html.

One way of communicating quickly and efficiently with a large number of mobile users can be found at http://www.hslsms.com/solutions/alertbroadcast/. This service is often used in parallel with HSL's WebSMS solution (http://www.hslsms.com/solutions/websms/)

Secure Mobile Messaging #1

2010-04-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

SMS is not a completely secure technology and therefore using SMS for communicating sensitive messages could have severe consequences if the message was intercepted,. The technology is adequately secure for a number of purposes such as chat between friends or colleagues, news alerts and entertainment or informational content. For these purposes the use of SMS is appropriate.

In reality the uses to which SMS are put are many and it is often too convenient a technology that leads to its use being inappropriate for some purposes.

The vertical sectors that can benefit the most from secure mobile messaging and to whom disclosure of a message can potentially be catastrophic are financial, law enforcement, government and aviation. Even although most benefit is typically achieved by theses sectors, secure mobile messaging also has a strong place across most most organisations.

Why is SMS not secure? There are a number of stages at which an SMS message can be intercepted. GSM addresses some of these stages but none sufficiently to deliver complete security. For a message being sent between two mobile users belonging to two different mobile networks the stages are: (1) air interface, (2) transmission links and switches, (3) SMSC platform, (4) transmission links and switches (origin network), (5) transmission links and switches (destination network) and (6) air interface. The air interfaces in stages (1) and (6) are typically secured using A5/1 or A5/3 encryption, the latter being less common but increasing in usage, however it is possible to intercept SMS to or from a specific handset if you are using the same cell as the target handset. Once the message is away from the air interface the message is being passed unencrypted through infrastructure forming the rest of an operator's network and through infrastructure belonging to other parties. It is when a message is traversing this infrastructure that it is at its most vulnerable, and where a sensitive message has the potential to be disclosed.

All it takes is an employee of a mobile operator with access to the relevant equipment or links to "open up" your message and read it. There have been cases in the past where mobile network engineers have snooped on SMS messages without authorisation. Such casual snooping can be easily hidden as being related to a legitimate task so as to not arouse suspicion. SMS messages have even been illegally snooped on by government officials.

Using SMS in Schools

2010-04-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

Making contact with parents when a school needs to can be a time consuming and therefore expensive task when someone has to pick up the telephone and speak with each parent. When the boiler breaks down, getting the local radio station to broadcast the news that the school is closed can allow a large percentage of parents to be reached but not everyone will get the news. When Sally didn’t turn up for school, in addition to John, Aidan, Karen, Paul, Kirsty, and fifteen other children, someone at the school needs to speak with a parent to find out why the child is absent.

As every parent typically carries their mobile with them, even when at work, the parent is instantly contactable. Add to this the instant means of reaching a large number of parents simultaneously through SMS, you have a powerful and scalable means of communicating instantly with parents when you need to.

SMS is integrated into a number of school attendance management systems and allows SMS to be sent by the school to the mobile telephone of a parent of an absent child. This capability to send SMS typically also allows broadcast messages to be quickly sent to parents even when the broadcast has to go to many, many parents.

During the winter months in the UK many schools were closed due to snowfall. SMS played an important part in allowing schools to communicate with the parents of pupils in such a way that the high number of parents that had to be contacted did not prevent them being reached before pupils would be arriving at the school. This direct, immediate and almost total communication is something that TV, radio or word of mouth cannot fully address.

HSL provides a number of services and solutions that can be used to enable communications with large groups of people. HSL WebSMS provides a web interface that can be used to easily send a message to distribution lists via a web browser. HSL AlertBroadcast allows a controller to send a message from their own mobile to distribution lists, thus removing the need to be at a computer to send a broadcast message.